A Study of Setting

Learning the integral vocabulary for writers, student now incorporate further detail into the setting of their stories by using various manipulatives to build where their story takes place. Look for our finished products up on our class bulletin board soon!

Pencil Grip

Writing Workshop focuses on different writing skills every few days. Each week one session is devoted entirely to pencil grip and handwriting. Pencil grip is one of the most important skills for children to learn early. By age six and seven it becomes exponentially harder to change irregular and ineffective pencil grip and therefore correct handwriting. Here students struggle to change their grip and are amazed to find how much their new hand hold helps their writing. This also helps many who are reluctant to write due to how their letters look.



The proper and most easily controlled grip is a three finger hold close to the tip of the writing utensil. The tool should rest on the writers skin between the forefinger and thumb. The pencil should be held loosely enough to be pulled out of the hand of the writer with ease.

Indoor Snowball Fight

It the oldest trick in the book, and one of the best. When you want students to stop gazing out at the snow, you've got to bring the snow inside. To share what we plan to bring for our 100th Day of School each student wrote a sentence on a white piece of paper and crumpled it into a snowball. For thirty seconds the class got to throw the balls until the call went out to stop. This was repeated three times until we met at the carpet to read our sentences and get some new ideas about what a hundreds collection could be.

Turning the Tables on Reading Buddies

We have come so far this year we had our first chance to read to our reading buddies! Our reading buddies were shocked to learn how far our reading skills have come, some third graders even spoke to their teacher about how they need to work harder in class to keep up with us!

Engineering

With the addition of three new workstations daily students are challenged to work together to build a thematic structure to two different ways. Here students build a snow angel using the floor as a base. When they were asked if they could stand it up they replayed, "We can make another one that stands up, but it can't look exactly like this one." Good thinking going on all the time.